Along with Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, Melissa McCarthy is one of those performers who’s been on “Saturday Night Live” so many times, as a host or making extremely memorable guest appearances, that it’s easy to forget she wasn’t an actual cast member.

McCarthy sure could have been, as she demonstrated again in her sixth time as host, where she showed off her incredible commitment to comedic bits. She has a knack for heightening moments and introducing characters that range from sad, weird loners to shifty and overconfident schemers. Even when McCarthy is simply portraying a heightened version of herself, as in this episode’s monologue, she’s apt to fling herself over a piano bench or introduce a new talent, namely “mouth horn” (more on that in a bit).

As reliable a comic force as McCarthy can be, she can still be held back by weak writing, as has happened a few times in past appearances. In this episode, she benefited from coming off a strong cold open featuring Colin Jost as aggressive Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and a funny monologue to launch into a trio of sketches that were as great as any she’s done on the show before, despite a few instances of her microphone sounding muffled.

She played a clingy woman who latches on to a supermarket worker (Jeremy Culhane) handing out cheese samples, a seemingly friendly elderly neighbor who goes to extremes to show her friendship to a 12-year-old boy, and a terrible UPS employee caught misbehaving on someone’s doorbell camera.

Things got a little bumpier after “Weekend Update” with sketches that pushed McCarthy back to supporting roles, like one that featured Andrew Dismukes as an overly sensitive Sunday supper host and one about moms who play truth or dare for the first time (it gets sexual very quickly). These were fine, but didn’t take advantage of McCarthy’s skills as much and felt like they could have been done any other week.

Later on, things improved when McCarthy played the mayor of Cousin Planet in a very silly music video from Jane Wickline and Veronika Slowikowska, and one half of a New York City couple (with Bowen Yang) showing off their kitschy holiday decorations for Spectrum News NY1.

McCarthy is a comedic national treasure and when she’s allowed to fire on all cylinders on “SNL,” as she was in a few of the night’s sketches, there’s nothing like it.

Musical guest Dijon performed “HIGHER!” and “Baby!/Another Baby!” Before the goodbyes, a title card honored Craig Kellem, a producer on the first season of “Saturday Night Live” who died this week.

This week’s cold open brought back Jost as Hegseth in a White House press conference. Jost played him as a petulant, energy drink-chugging bully, who starts by asking the assembled reporters, “Where are the fatties?” Referencing the U.S. attacks on sea vessels in Venezuela, he told the reporters, “Pretend I’m a random fishing boat and fire away.” Matt Gaetz (Sarah Sherman) was among the reporters, showing up to ask if the U.S. was intercepting all illegal things being transported across borders, or just drugs. Hegseth made pop culture references in his responses, including invoking “6-7” and singing some of the famous “Animaniacs” nations of the world song. A sleepy President Trump (James Austin Johnson) seated near Hegseth woke up from a sexy dream about New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani to remind us that the “fog of war” only comes up when people are trying to hide war crimes before napping again. “We gotta get him to another MRI before he wakes up,” Hegseth said.

In her monologue, McCarthy kicked off Christmas season on “SNL” by showing off her talent for “mouth horn,” a kind of humming/blowing/beatboxing of songs like “Carol of the Bells.” She got a lot of snow dumped on her and fought with cast member Marcello Hernández as he tried to move a piano across the stage. Dejected, McCarthy was joined by Kenan Thompson, whom she called “Santa Kenan” before cast members came on stage to close it out with “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” with McCarthy mouth horning the song.

Best sketch of the night: Firing of the worst UPS employee is USPS’s gain

McCarthy plays Donna, a UPS delivery driver who has been hurling packages on a customer’s porch, opening up boxes and even squatting to relieve herself until it’s dark, all revealed in a series of security videos. Donna’s denials, her attempts to scoot out of the meeting with UPS managers (Mikey Day and Ashley Padilla), her fake fainting and her tenacity in chewing on paper while Day tries to pull it from her mouth were all excellent. So much so that Day, who has worked with McCarthy since her days at The Groundlings, starts to break character and hold back laughs, something extremely rare for him.

Also good: Cousins don’t even exist in July

You could make a strong argument that the video about the vengeful elderly woman and the supermarket sketches were better showcases for McCarthy, but there’s something catchy and true about this low-fi video that considers where cousins go when you don’t see them during the holidays. It turns out they live on Cousin Planet where family secrets are revealed and every conversation is catching up. The first rule is that cousins shouldn’t hook up, but the second rule is that the first rule is flexible. This video is funny, weird and a great showcase for featured players Wickline and Slowikowska.

‘Weekend Update’ winner: That’s it, drunk raccoon, you’re cut off

Ben Sherman was entertaining as Lance, a redhead who was badly sunburned on vacation (he even brought a ginger boys’ choir), but it was tough to top Sarah Sherman’s all-over-the-desk portrayal of the drunk racoon that went viral after being found passed out in a Virginia liquor store. Sherman asked “Update” co-presenter Jost if they’d hooked up the night before and kept propositioning him (“I’ll ride your head like a Davy Crockett hat”) while also abusing him (“Quiet, piggy!”). The guest bit benefited from a nice use of cuts to black and white to show Sherman as a raccoon caught on a Ring camera.

A Private Life, 2025.

Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski.
Starring Jodie Foster, Daniel Auteuil, Virginie Efira, Mathieu Amalric, Vincent Lacoste, Luàna Bajrami, Noam Morgensztern, Sophie Guillemin, Frederick Wiseman, Aurore Clément, Irène Jacob, Park Ji-Min, Jean Chevalier, Emma Ravier, Scott Agnesi Delapierre, and Lucas Bleger.

SYNOPSIS:

The renowned psychiatrist Lilian Steiner mounts a private investigation into the death of one of her patients, whom she is convinced has been murdered.

The first order of business here is to note that the so-called renowned psychiatrist Lilian Steiner is French, meaning that Jodie Foster speaks French throughout the majority of co-writer/director Rebecca Zlotowski’s mystery A Private Life. Her accent and handling of the language are also impressive, and that alone is a reason to check out the film. It also must be mentioned that Lilian isn’t precisely a psychiatrist fully attentive to her patients; if anything, she seems bored by them, which is perhaps part of the reason why her mind concocts a riddle to solve within her recordings when a patient, Paula Cohen-Solal (Virginie Efira), turns up dead.

One of Lilian’s patients also shows up hostile, demanding that their sessions be finished as he has found a hypnotist capable of curing his vices (smoking) in a limited time. This also piques her curiosity and brings her to that same hypnotist, where, even though she is condescending and dismissive of the entire concept, she finds herself falling under a spell that could hold clues to uncovering the murderer. With that said, it’s as much a film about Lilian questioning her purpose and the methods deployed regarding her line of work as it is a crafty, twisty puzzle box to solve.

Divorced from her husband, Lillan gets roped into helping Gabriel (Daniel Auteuil), who gets roped into her bumbling around, which inevitably leads to discussions about their failed love life. Similarly, Lillan also has a fractured relationship with her grown son, Julian (Vincent Lacoste), now a parent himself, with the running joke that whenever she stops by, the baby wakes up and starts crying profusely. Her personal life is rife with confusion, and her professional life is a bore, pushing her further and further into a mystery that might solely be in her head.

Not to give too much away, but there probably wouldn’t be a movie if there was absolutely nothing to solve here. Naturally, A Private Life has plenty of suspects that crop up from the tapes Lilian plays back to herself, searching for something that will point her in the right direction. It turns out that Paula also led a dysfunctional family life, but, more concerning, it could also be a suicide potentially aided by Lilian herself, once accidentally prescribing the wrong dosage of medicine. With the way some of those recordings are shot and presented in a hazy, hypnotic flashback form, complete with close-ups of Paula lying down on the couch, one also begins to wonder if there is a psychosexual angle at play here.

It shouldn’t be any surprise that A Private Life (co-written by Anne Berest, in collaboration with Gaëlle Macé) is also aggressively silly while cycling through every potential suspect, and that, even if there are clear answers here, the narrative is less about what happened and more about and more proper, present method of conducting therapy. The message the film ultimately lands on there isn’t entirely convincing. To be fair, everything involving the hypnotism is also quite absurd and strains credulity. However, it doesn’t take away from the fact that this is still an entertaining mystery with some compelling character work and an engrossing, controlled spiral of a performance from Jodie Foster.

Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★

Robert Kojder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist

Originally published December 6, 2025. Updated December 7, 2025.

“Are you ready? Then we shall begin.”

This narration, over an image of three moons hanging in the sky, begins Julia Jackman’s “100 Nights of Hero,” which she adapted from Isabel Greenberg’s 2016 graphic novel and directed. It signifies that we’re in for a level of heightened, self-reflective fantasy storytelling and, in fact, the revolutionary power of storytelling itself is the beating heart of this film.

Jackman takes her own stylistic approach to “100 Nights of Hero” without replicating Greenberg’s aesthetic. You can almost immediately tell this fantastical film has a feminine touch in its colorful, highly stylized look and sound; there’s a certain girlish wit in the vibrant pink hues and the centering of women’s narratives within the mannered compositions. The setting is a secluded, cult-like community that reveres their god, Birdman (Richard E. Grant, in a cameo), and fashions their patriarchal society around the usual tenets: controlling women, producing heirs.

Young bride Cherry (Maika Monroe) is married to Jerome (Amir El-Masry) and though he claims they are trying to have a baby, he is not. Too bad she’s the one who will suffer the consequences of failing to get pregnant. Soon, the hunky Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine) shows up and the two men engage in a cruel bet: Manfred has 100 nights alone in the castle to seduce Cherry while Jerome is away on business. If he fails, he has to find a baby for Jerome, who is uninterested in sex with women. If Manfred succeeds, he gets the castle. But if Cherry strays, she hangs. (It’s a lose-lose situation for the wife, as expected.)

Cherry has one person on her side, Hero (Emma Corrin), her cunning maid, who distracts Manfred from his goal by telling the story of three sisters who engage in the “sinful, wicked and absolutely forbidden” (for women) pleasure of reading and writing. One of the sisters, Rosa (Charli XCX), is married off to a merchant who soon discovers her “witchcraft.”

Every night, Hero tacks on a new chapter of the three sisters, their story interwoven with Cherry and Manfred’s, while we discover that Hero is a part of the League of Secret Storytellers: women who collect tales and weave them into tapestries, their work hiding their true intention while the stories spread from ear to ear.

The issues here are basic and elemental: the trials and tribulations of sex, marriage, fidelity and procreation. Though brides are trapped in castles and men wearing bird masks want to burn the witches, this story is not so out of our time or place. The pressure to “produce an heir” lives on in current pro-natalist arguments and “trad wife” discourse, and the control of women’s bodies — and minds — is required to fulfill the goal of producing more and more babies. This tale doesn’t seem so ancient or fantastical at all.

However, there’s little nuance to the storytelling of “100 Nights of Hero” itself. It feels a bit like feminism for tweens, a young-adult approach to explaining how the liberation of minds is necessary for the liberation of bodies. The film is blunt and obvious to its detriment. Its quirky, opulent aesthetic can only sustain the exercise for so long.

As our interest wanes over the course of this 90-minute modernist fable, Manfred starts to slip away — natural for a folktale that seeks to deprioritize men. Unfortunately, Galitzine’s screen presence is just too powerful to ignore and we notice his absence. Perhaps it’s that Manfred is so swaggeringly confident, Galitzine’s embodiment of fluid sensuality standing in stark contrast to Monroe’s stiff, anxious, breathy performance as Cherry.

The most powerful image of the film, which is made up of interesting images, is of Galitzine covered in blood as he hauls a freshly killed stag home for lunch. If the film is about women discovering their own pleasure and sensuality outside of men, they shouldn’t have made Manfred the most appealing and earthy character on screen.

While “100 Nights of Hero” has compelling actors and beautiful visuals, its storytelling (about the power of storytelling) is unfortunately less than riveting. The urgency of the message is clear but the delivery leaves something to be desired.